Quiet In My Town
by only-because3
Summary: She squeezed her pained eyes shut and put down her fork. She opened her eyes and smiled at him with her broken face. "When you're older, I'll tell you everything you want to know." Brooke centered ONESHOT


Hey all! So this originally was drabble that was essentially plotless but with the help of my MSN girlies, I got it figured out (even though I had a total mind blank and couldn't decide on an ending). It's emo and sad and just me I suppose lol. Hope y'all enjoy!

* * *

She sits lazily on her bed, bruises and mind aching. Jamie's asleep in Peyton's old room, the room she's slowly going to turn into a room for just him. She needs to throw herself into doing something other than worrying about her company and her body. She supposes that she should start making Jamie breakfast but she can't will herself to get up just yet.

Last night Jamie asked her what happened to her. Obviously, Haley hadn't said anything to him and was probably confused as hell about her mini little break down a week ago. She simply told him she got hurt and told him to be careful on the stairs.

"Your eyes are black... Q told me that he gave someone a black eye when he was in a fight, before he wanted to be good..." Jamie mumbled in-between bites of Spongebob shaped macaroni. "Did you get into a fight with someone Aunt Brooke?"

She squeezed her pained eyes shut and put down her fork. She opened her eyes and smiled at him with her broken face. "When you're older, I'll tell you everything you want to know."

She lets out a ragged breath and dries the tears on her multicolored face. She gets out of bed and checks on Jamie who is still asleep and then makes her way to the kitchen. She silently makes pancakes, eggs, and hash browns, way more than she knows they'll eat. Her front door opens unexpectedly and she flinches, dropping the pan of eggs on the ground. "Brooke?"

She looks up to see Lucas in her home, shutting the door behind him. "You scared me," she says in a monotone voice, squatting down to pick up the ruined eggs.

"Nathan sent me to pick up Jamie," he tells her and she simply nods her head.

"He's still sleeping..." Her voice is so low and void of emotion that he worries.

"Are you okay," he asks and she doesn't answer him, just asks where Peyton is.

He walks closer to her and she moves back just as he's about to touch her. "I need to make more eggs," she says, bypassing him, making sure she does NOT touch him. He catches her wrist and turns her around. His eyes are focussed on her body which is dressed in a loose pair of short boxers and an oversized tank top. It's _freezing_ and he doesn't understand how she can be comfortable or warm in so little.

She tenses up when she feels his touch and tenses even more when she sees his eyes lock on her bruises. The air turns on again, maintaining the cool 70 degrees in her home. The cold air is like a touch of God on her bruises but she suddenly wishes she covered up more.

Without saying another word, he gets down on his knees, warm, rough hand touching the large bruise that wraps around her thigh. She tears herself away from his burning touch and storms into the guest bedroom she's been residing in. She pulls off her clothes and puts on the biggest pair of sweats she has and a large oversized sweatshirt.

The door opens and Lucas stands confused and scared in the doorway. "Peyton said you fell down the stairs," he says slowly, his eyes only able to see the bruises and cuts that line her once beautiful face.

"I did," she replies but he shakes his head.

"Falling down the stairs wont give you a bruise on the inside of your thigh."

"Proves how much of a klutz I am." She can't even find it in her to pretend that was a joke.

"Brooke," he pushes and her brow furrows in anger. Where is he coming off acting like he still cares?

"I'll take Jamie home. Please leave," she says in tight clipped words.

"You need to tell someone what happened Brooke... if someone hurt you-"

"GET OUT," she growls at him, hands yearning for the comfort of _something _that will protect her from everything she wants to forget.

He looks at her sadly before turning around. "Uncle Lucas?"

"Hey buddy," Lucas manages to get out, adding a small smile to comfort his small nephew in dinosaur pajamas.

"Are you guys fighting," he asks in such an innocent voice that tears almost enter Brooke's eyes.

"Of course not," she answers for Lucas and wraps her arms around her body in an effort to stop it from breaking down.

"Are you eating breakfast with us Uncle Luke," Jamie asks and Lucas opens his mouth to respond before stopping.

Brooke clears her throat before shaking her head, "Actually buddy, you got to go home..." His childish smile falls from his face and he nods before going to pack up his things.

Before Lucas leaves he tells Brooke, "If you won't tell me, at least tell someone. Closing up is only gonna hurt you more."

She slammed the door in his face.

* * *

It's been a couple months. She's given up her company and her life. She sits at home now and stares into nothing. Her bruises have disappeared but have been replaced with a protruding stomach. Nobody knows. On the rare occasions she sees her friends she makes sure that her belly is hidden well. She denied it to herself as long as she could but that in turn made her wait too long and she figures it's just as well. Maybe she could love this baby...

Owen comes over one day. It's weird, seeing him again in her house no less and she's still un wanted to him. After all now she's pregnant and she knows how much he hates that. He sees her one morning when he's over for breakfast without her shirt on. He sees the pale stretched skin and he asks her who she's with.

"No one... I'm with no one." They don't talk much. He comes over to visit a lot and they eat and watch tv and sit in silence. Since he's already seen her stomach, she wears regular shirt in his presence, one of the few things in life she's grateful for.

But it's all ruined when Haley stops over with Jamie unexpectedly one day. "We were worried," she told her and then caught site of her stomach.

Owen lies for her quickly. The reason she hasn't been around so much is because he was selfishly keeping her from then. "Guess I got a little carried away," he laughs and wraps his arm around Brooke, hand resting on her stomach. She tries not to visibly flinch but it's hard. No one has touched her body since the attack five months ago.

"Brooke! This is so great! I can't believe you didn't tell me," Haley gushes, and Brooke looks down to see Jamie's bright toothless smile. So, for the sake of the people she has considered her family for such a long time, she puts an obviously fake smile on her face. It doesn't go unnoticed by the woman in front of her who then smiles at her in that way she smiles at Jamie. "Don't be worried honey, you're going to be a great mom."

"Thank you," she replies out of manners that have been instilled in her since birth. But she makes up a lie that she isn't feeling well because she can not put on this facade any longer and excuses herself.

Owen comes in a few minutes later to find her crying on her bed. "They're gone." She starts crying even harder because she's realized that now she's stuck with two things she doesn't want, a baby and Owen. "What's going on with you Brooke?"

She inhales loudly in order to keep everything back and sits up slowly, moving herself away from the bartender. "_Everything_ is _wrong_," she tells him and then binds herself to this man. "I need you to help me with this... I can't be alone and explain this to them... I need you to keep pretending for me... please?" She sounds so weak and she _hates_ it. She hates that she needs someone and that it's the wrong person and she's just rolling with the punches instead of punching back.

He himself looks scared and confused but he nods none the less. He moves to hug her but she scoots away. "Don't touch me."

And with that she leaves the room.

* * *

Haley and Peyton have gotten together to throw her a surprise baby shower.

_Fabulous._

She's surrounded by women she barely knows and she has to pretend that she's happy to be getting fat with this... thing inside her. She _hates_ her life. She hates that she wanted a baby _so_ much and now that she's pregnant she just wants it out of her. It's like a parasite, feeding off of her and it's turning her into someone she doesn't even know. Everything just hurts and with every day that passes, her attack won't go away It's still there every time she looks in a mirror or feels the spawn moving under her skin.

And when she begins opening the presents for her baby girl from the people she once considered friends, she loses it. She starts sobbing uncontrollably and everyone thinks it's from happiness. She's disgusted that she can sit in front of people, _friends_, and cry her heart out and no one **sees** her.

"Excuse me," she says, adding a fake smile on her face as she walks into Haley's house and into a bathroom. She wipes off her face that she has painted on in an effort to make her look how a happy pregnant woman should look. When her face is dry she looks into the mirror and sees the bruises that are always present in her reflection.

And for a split second, she sees that tall man behind her in his black outfit from head to toe. Her body begins to ache and she can feel his hands push up her dress and _touch_ her.

She throws up for the next ten minutes.

* * *

Her house is like the one she grew up in. Big, beautiful, and filled with unhappy people living a life they never wanted to sign up for. Owen's unhappy, she knows he is, but he's sticking around because she needs him and he's a good man. She's unhappy because she has everything she's ever really wanted but in such a backwards way. At times she almost feels like Alice in Wonderland, with everything so different than the life she knows.

So when she wakes up one morning and sees Owen sitting with his sad tired face trying to eat a bowl of cereal she starts crying, something that has become normal for her during these past months. "I want you to leave Owen," she tells him and he's shocked. He stumbles over his words and says he made the choice to stay with her. That he wants to be there.

She slaps him and tells him to stop being stupid. "I'm ruining your life... you need to go." He nods and tells her that she deserves more than what she's giving herself. She smiles sadly and says, "No. I don't."

* * *

It's been two months and she's near her due date. She hasn't cried since Owen left, in an effort to make her life seem better than it is. She keeps spending time with Jamie and putting on her fake face that she wears when she's with her friends. He tells her how awesome it is that she's gonna have a baby and she can't bring herself to respond. "Do you not want a baby Aunt Brooke," he asks one day and she sighs deeply.

"When you're older I'll tell you everything."

Jamie must tell Haley and Nathan this because whenever she sees them after she drops her godson off, they ask if she's okay. "Is it because Owen left," Haley questions innocently one day and for the first time in months Brooke laughs.

"No, definitely not."

Nathan has forced her to go out to dinner with them, describing it as, "One last hurrah before the baby comes as Haley keeps telling me." She wishes they'd stop mentioning it. Some days if she tries real hard, she can forget about the belly that is always visible to her considering how huge she is.

When she gets to dinner, it's like the old days. Everyone's talking, and for once not about her current situation. It seems almost like a dream and she's stunned when she hears her own laugh. She stops laughing when she hears it, and puts her hand up to her mouth in wonder. She looks around her and sees her family smiling. "It's good to have you back Brooke," Peyton says softly. Lucas nods beside her, huge smile on his face, but still matched with the worried eyes he had that morning all those months ago.

"And Brooke, we're going to be here for you, no matter what," Nathan tells her and Haley loops her arm through his and nods.

"We'll help you through it," Haley adds and Brooke exhales. She nods and tells her friends thank you, hugging each of them. Maybe she could do this... maybe she could put the attack behind her and love her baby unconditionally like she should. Maybe it would be exactly what she dreamed of and she could be happy again.

Later, after she's gone home and showered, she looks at herself in the huge mirror above her vanity. She frowns when she sees her bruises and cuts and her attacker once more.

She'll never escape this.

* * *

A week later while she's sitting at home watching General Hospital, something she's become addicted to when she feels fluid between her legs. She looks down and finds the bottom of her dress soaked, groaning as she gets up. She's so calm it's scary. She gets up, changes her clothes and finds her keys and drives herself to the hospital. When she gets there, she calmly tells the nurse that she'll need a room considering a child should be shooting out of her soon.

The nurse looks at her funny but directs her to a room and gives her forms to fill out. "Is there someone I can call for you," she asks and Brooke ponders for a moment. She scribbles down two numbers and a message for both.

"Don't call until she's out of me," Brooke instructs her and the nurse takes the small piece of paper and nods.

When she finally arrives, her so called 'bundle of joy' is placed in her arms. She looks down at her daughter's red hair and green eyes and she can't stand it. This baby shouldn't belong to her. Her daughter shouldn't look like this. She doesn't even smile, just stares at her harshly and Brooke snaps.

She can't do this.

She needs to get this child out of her arms because she's repulsed. She can't love this, no matter how much she wants to because all she can see is the attack and all she can feel is the complete numbing pain.

She cries, cries harder than she ever has before and when the door opens she doesn't even look up. "Brooke?"

"I can't do this Lucas, I can not do this. Take her away from me..." She's crying so hard she can barely breathe and she feels like she's suffocating. He walks over to her quickly and she looks up at him so helplessly. "Please... Luke, please take her." She holds the baby up towards him and he takes her from the shattered girl lying on the bed.

When her arms are free, she brings her hands to her eyes in an effort to block all this out. To go back to that dinner where she was happy and everything was good. "What's happened to you Brooke?" His sentence only makes her cry harder.

He looks down at the girl he once knew and realizes that she hasn't been that girl inside for a long time. She's lost her spark and her drive and her ability to love everything and everyone with such an open heart. He moves her daughter, whom he knows now isn't Owen's and only makes him think back to that morning in her house where he saw the bruise covering her thigh.

He sits in the bed next to her and wraps his arm around her shaking shoulders. She scoots away, not from him nessicarily, but from the baby she's relinquished to his arms. He kisses the side of her head and god it hurts so much yet it's something she craves so desperately.

She's _ruined._

She can no longer accept actions of love from people she used be friends, lovers, and family with. She can no longer be the mother she yearned to be. She can no longer be the strong loving woman she used to be.

When Owen comes in later, he finds them in that situation, Lucas looking so drained like he himself used to with Brooke's baby in his arms. They make eye contact in the silence of Brooke's sobs and Owen tells him that he'll figure it out.

Lucas gets up from the bed with the baby and steps out of the room with Owen. "She can't keep her... she won't even hold her..."

Their eyes fill with tears and Owen nods.

* * *

Lucas tells everyone that the baby was stillborn. That Brooke couldn't tell everyone the news and that's why only he went. They're all so sad for her and it probably hurts Haley the most. She keeps keeping Jamie close and trying to keep him away from Brooke so that she doesn't feel even worse.

It doesn't matter though because a month later, after feeling nothing but pain and hate for a year, she kills herself. It's not like it's particularly painful, after all nothing ever has been since the attack. When she does it, she locks herself in her bathroom with towels laid everywhere because she wants an easy clean up for who ever finds her.

Lucas and Haley find her, something she really wished wouldn't have happened. She left a note, two to be exact. One explaining that she's sorry for taking the easy way out but it was all just too hard. Haley thinks she's talking about her supposed dead baby but Lucas knows what the truth of her words are. The other is a letter for Jamie, which should be opened when Haley finds him a suitable age. In it she's written everything out, every horrid and happy memory and she makes a silent pray before she pulls the trigger that he'll be able to bare the weight of her secrets.

* * *

I'm sorry I did it again :( Hope y'all enjoyed anyway :D


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